Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The Madness of a Lost Society

As this latest Black Friday clearly demonstrated, Americans are literally willing to trample one another to get the best deals on cheap foreign-made plastic crap. Meanwhile, as thousands of factories and millions of jobs continue to get shipped overseas, the United States is rapidly turning into a post-industrial wasteland. Once great manufacturing cities such as Camden, New Jersey have become crime-ridden, gang-infested hellholes. In some U.S. cities, the “real” unemployment rate is around 30 or 40 percent. The American people desperately need jobs, but the American people are also showing no signs that they plan to give up their addiction to cheap foreign goods. Our politicians keep insisting that the American people just need “more education” and “more skills” in order to compete, but they don’t ever seem to explain how more education and more skills are going to make new jobs pop into existence out of thin air. The truth is that the American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Nightmare and there is not much hope that any of this is going to turn around any time soon.